1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to methods and systems for accessing hardware resources, and more particularly, to methods and systems for accessing hardware resources in electronic devices with browser-based operating systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Most desktop operating systems (OSs) are designed to work with applications installed and executed locally using solid-state storage or a hard drive. Recently, with improvements in computer technology and growth in processor design, cloud computing has been used widely in many applications. A browser-based OS, such as Chromium OS, is a simplified operating system that runs a web browser to allow the use of cloud computing to access applications and data in the cloud. The browser-based OS boots into a web browser as its user interface instead of a typical desktop on regular operating systems. The browser-based OS may be designed for electronic devices that are mainly used to browse the Internet, such as Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, PCs, mobile phones, and so on.
Such browser-based OSs work exclusively with web applications, which are composed with web languages, such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or JavaScript. The browser-based OS includes a browser running on a stripped-down version of a kernel such as Linux while the applications run on the Internet instead of Linux. Because of its simplicity, the browser-based OSs can boot extremely quickly and are easy to use. However, with everything stored on the cloud, hardware requirements for electronic devices with browser-based OSs are relatively low and hardware capabilities are also limited. In addition, for reasons of security and technological limitations, the web applications running in a browser-based OS cannot directly communicate with device drivers and cannot access hardware resources as a native operating system can.